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Category Archives: NaNoWriMo!

(And I know that it’s December, because I woke up to both snow and a gigantic cat stealing my blankets. Sigh.)

It being December, that means that NaNoWriMo is officially over, now. How did you all do? :)

As for me, I ended up not actually winning, which…doesn’t surprise me all that much. I’m a perfectionistic sort of flouncer when it comes to writing; I have to be writing 34089567 different projects simultaneously, and labouring over every single word of every single one of them, in order to be happy.

As a result, NaNoWriMo and I have never really gotten along, hah. (Especially because my prose is not only nitpicked over, but also naturally very sparse. If the word isn’t perfect, doesn’t flow poetically in with all the rest, then I don’t want it.)

But! Despite not winning, I’m not terribly disappointed with how the month turned out. I ended up with ideas for several new projects; wrote a big chunk of one of them (a chunk that I think I might actually be happy with, after some editing); even wrote a bit on the older project that’s been with me for half my life now and is my baby; and most importantly, did not end up spewing out fifty thousand words of something that I would be throwing out today, because I am too perfectionistic to ever look at it again. Which is precisely what would’ve happened if I had won NaNo, oi.

And now that NaNo is over, I can go back to working on The Clockwork Coloratura! Which, I have to say, I’ve missed. I’m excited to go back — and to start posting it for Six Sunday again!

I also want to start posting here in general more, now that NaNo is over. NaNo being over doesn’t mean the end of productivity, you know. :P

If anything, I want to get more done this month than I did last; just not necessarily measure productivity only by wordcount.

I started Day One with endless enthusiasm and absolutely no shortage of ideas…and, typically, absolutely no way to pick between any of them. (Thank you, Libra.)

And so, also typically, on Day One I just started in with my general default of Writing All the Things, and worked on two completely different projects.

By the end of Day One, however, I had decided that neither one of the two projects I had worked on was the right one, but figured the right one would find me sooner or later.

And late that night, just as I was settling into bed, yet another plotbunny suddenly launched itself atop my brain, and began to very ravenously gnaw.

This did not surprise me, either, and I just decided to give in and give this rabid new thing a go.

And I have. We’ve made some progress (even if not nearly as much as I should have), and after some serious rethinking and reworking I may actually have a somewhat viable story, here.

But. But.

YET AGAIN, for about the third time thus far, I don’t know that that one is the story, the one I can throw myself into so completely that I spew out 50,000 words of it in a one-month span.

Luckily (or unluckily, however you want to look at it), however, as I was leaving work last night, Plotbunny #4 (yes, #4) hit.

The kind of plotbunny where, even if she shake your head quite sternly at it and tell it no, that you’ve already begun another project and do not particularly care to completely start NaNoWriMo over halfway through the month, it will hop up and down inside your head so energetically that you will not be able to focus on anything else, however hard you may try.

Needless to say, Plotbunny #4 would not let go, and I know how this goes well enough to realise that I’m doomed.

I decided to at least be graceful about the whole mess, and give in and start writing it anyway.

Will it go well? Hell if I know! But for now, it’s coming quickly and easily and the bunny and I are getting on quite well, so I can’t really complain. :)

The title is Mei & June, it’s teen fiction/romance (yup, two girls!), and the first draft of the blurb?

Mei has not been home in over three years, not since the night with the screaming and the broken glass and her mother barging into her bedroom to tell her to wake up, that they had to get away.

Mostly, she doesn’t mind. She doesn’t miss her dad, or the way her parents always fought, or how she always had to sleep her with her door shut and her head under the pillow just to block them out.

The only thing she misses is her best friend. Not being home in over three years means it’s been three years since she last got to see her best friend…the best friend her mother tried to forbid her from speaking to at all after they left, for fear that Mei’s father would be able to track them through any connections they kept.

But Mei and June have been inseperable ever since they were little girls, and that much, at least, is never going to change.

So when June tells Mei that she needs to come with her to her old high school’s prom, Mei says yes against her mother’s will, and June drives for hours to come to steal her away in the middle of the night, and that’s when the world begins turning back over on its ear.

And now for the first Six Sunday snippet of the piece itself!

Here, Mei is recounting the night she and her mother left, the way her mother woke her up shouting at her to pack, that they were going to leave, before darting back out to continue the shouting match with Mei’s father that had prompted said decision to leave. As Mei was waiting for the fight to end and to see how it would go, she sent a hurried text to her best friend:

‘Parents fighting. Think Mom is about to leave, and drag me with her. Lyk details when I have any. Love you, June. Hopefully I’ll see you soon.‘

(June is, obviously, my best friend’s name — June Elise Roberts. I generally only call her that when things are really serious, though; otherwise she prefers me to use her initials and just call her Jer.)

I didn’t bother to apologise for texting her so late at night, because the girl sleeps like the dead, and I knew that even if she had gone to sleep with her phone’s volume on, there was no way it would wake her up.

Part of me was glad of that, despite the fact she wouldn’t have gotten mad at me if I had woken her up, but part of me was also more than a little bit desperate to hear her voice, especially not knowing when we would get to see each other again.

She’s the sort of girl who, once you meet her, you don’t do too well without.

NaNoWriMo officially begins in just a handful of hours (here in my timezone, at least), and, typically, exactly as I had predicted, I still have absolutely no idea what in hell I’m going to be writing.

I do have ideas everywhere; I’m not at all stuck in that regard, at least. But even apart from the fact I can’t make decisions anyway, the projects I am most motivated to work on I doubt I can get the 50,000 words out of; and my muses, I have decided, are cats.

Not actual cats; that could at least be interesting. But by cat-muses, I mean that the ones that I am trying to pay attention to (ie, my more sensible-seeming NaNo ideas) want nothing to do with me right now, while the ones I’m trying not to pay attention to are currently clambering all over my brain, whinging desperately at me in miraculously unsubtle demands for love.

Cats. (If you have cats yourself, you will understand exactly what I mean.)

On the bright side, I really am an incurable pantser when it comes to writing, and so I’m not terribly concerned with my lack of time to plot. (Too, for me, part of the fun of writing is finding out stories for myself. If I’ve everything all plotted out as I go and already know everything that’s going to happen, the writing process loses a lot of its magic for me, and I feel that the lack of magic would show up in my prose itself. I don’t want that. I want stories that grow up organically like the living things they are, and I want to be so personally caught up in the magic of it that I can’t help but pass it on to readers, too.)

Ah well. Something or another will start coming out come midnight, and hopefully it will continue coming out thoughout the month!

In the meantime, though, I hope you are all having a safe and happy Halloween, and the best of luck to all of you other crazy-lovely people who are doing NaNo as well! ♥ (Feel free to pimp out your own NaNo projects in the comments, assuming you’re not like me and you have a proper project already, or to become NaNo buddies with me!)

And start yourselves off right:

Take a tiny break from writing on November 1st to go stock yourselves up on all the clearance Halloween candy, because god knows you are going to need it later on in this crazy month. :P